The Heideggerian Priority of the Ready-to-hand over the Present-at-hand
A Philosophical Division of Modes of Being, Applied to Music Listening
With this post, I am beginning to show where else, other than gear reviews, I want to take this substack. There is philosophical background that could be beneficial to have read, but I don’t think it is necessary for the purposes of this article. This is not just a gear blog. It’s a blog about the experience—specifically my experience—listening to music and discussing the equipment I use to listen to it.
I was reading an article shared on an audiophile forum, about how what we know influences what we hear. This main topic is not what I want to discuss, but I want to point to an instance of the natural view of ourselves and our world, where what 'really' exists is the Heideggerian concept of the ‘present-at-hand’*, which in the case of the example in the article, is 'a pattern of sound' which is 'interpreted as music'. See how the priority of the technological view is taken for granted by the natural view. Sound, as the present-at-hand mode of music's being, is something that is studied by the sciences of acoustics, psychoacoustics, etc. Music, as the ‘ready-to-hand’† work of art, asserting the fact of its being—its “that it is”—is what is heard.
Heidegger says elsewhere that what we first hear or even 'hearken to' is the sound of something, such as a carriage or a distant train, and not sound as a physical phenomenon. This is sound not present-at-hand—'mummified', as Nietzsche says of the goal of a certain way of doing history—but sound heard as the sound of something, not frozen as a physical thing to be studied using the methods of science. We can rarely hear sound as being present-at-hand. Perhaps a test tone of, say, 1 kHz would count. It takes effort to hear sound as present-at-hand. It is effortless (in a way) to hear music as ready-to-hand. This is not to say that listening to music is a passive activity. A person is constantly drawing comparisons with what has been heard before, thinking about harmonies and melodies in common with other pieces of music, considering different timbres, hearing stray noises in the recording, or whatever else they may be doing.
Hearing music is far from the study of it as a physical phenomenon. Listening to sound as present-at-hand is not hearing music. Despite the common-sense response that music is a kind of sound, in this discussion, sound and music have different modes of being. Heidegger asserts the priority of the ready-to-hand over the present-at-hand; he asserts, in effect though not explicitly, the priority of music over sound. An audiophile can listen to a stereo system, and it is then present-at-hand. But when an audiophile listens to the music, the stereo is ready-to-hand, and what is heard is music ready-to-hand, an artistic phenomenon produced by art. In this latter case, the sound is music, which is an artwork. In the former case, sound as present-at-hand, a physical phenomenon to be examined as the product of a technological system produced by the uses of science, engineering and other technological disciplines, is heard—and this is not music.
In the former case, the stereo and sound are obtrusive. They stand out prominently as something there, separate from me, a related pair of physical objects with associated physical processes. If there are thought to be imperfections in the stereo or the sound it produces, they will obtrude even more, since something is not functioning as it should; like a broken tool, a broken piece of equipment obtrudes, stands out oddly. In the latter case of listening to music, the stereo is ‘transparent’. It disappears, and what is present is the occurrence of music, an artistic work. This is like the transparent hammer of Heidegger’s Being and Time. The stereo is in use, ready-to-hand, functioning as it should, like a good hammer.
* Present-at-hand: Heidegger’s term used in Being and Time, meaning something like a thing when it is examined out of the context of its meaning or use.
† Ready-to-hand: Heidegger’s term used in Being and Time, meaning something like a thing when it is existing in a context of meaning and, for equipment, usefulness.